Murder State: California's Native American Genocide, 1846-1873

Introduction

Introduction The most general condition for guilt-free massacre is the denial of humanity to the victim. You call the victims names like gooks, dinks, niggers, pinkos, and japs.The more you can get high officials in government to use these names and others like yellow dwarfs with daggers and rotten apples, the more your success. . . . If contact is allowed, or it cannot be prevented, you indicate the contact is not between equals; you talk about the disadvantaged, the deprived. Troy Duster, “Conditions for Guilt-Free Massacre” (1971) The people of the United States were not empty vessels to be filled with fear and hatred of Indians encountered as they headed west in the middle of the nineteenth century on the overland trails or after reaching California.These emigrants already brimmed over with terror and hatred of Indians, a hatred born of their culture. Before Euro-American emigrants went west to California to settle, mine, or otherwise make their fortunes, they had clear notions of what Indians were and what should be done with them. Ingrained thinking about Native Americans brought by emigrants to California arguably proved to be more significant than anything the emigrants learned on the roads west or from experience in their new home. This was significant to the pattern of Indian-white relations in California because Euro-Americans’ view of Native Americans as inhuman animals helped to minimize any vacillation over whether or not to exterminate them. To borrow the words of Troy Duster, the “conditions for guilt-free massacre” of Native Americans had long been established in the social and cultural structures of American citizens. 36 part 1 White Americans’belief that Native peoples were less than human was a product of several centuries of racist sentiment codified and deployed in popular culture, education, and the press.This belief was part of the psychological foundations underpinning genocide. For settlers and would-be miners heading for California, the cultural demonization of Native Americans, deployed through education, books, and articles in newspapers, was a powerful influence on the way Indians were imagined in the collective Euro-American psyche. This cultural education was predisposed to teach the hatred or suspicion of barbarous Indians.This indoctrination, beginning in childhood, produced a powerful sense of righteousness in Euro-Americans when it came to the destruction of Indians, the boogeyman figure of North America until the late nineteenth century. Such thinking has historically played an important role in other genocides.1 Even on westward trails the education of Euro-Americans about savage Indians continued. Trail narratives and guides were used as tools to make the journey from the East to the West safely. Native Americans of course were a key concern for potential emigrants and, perhaps because of this, for writers of emigrant guidebooks. Despite significant contemporary evidence that disease and starvation would be the great challenges of the trail, the attitudes and actions of emigrants suggested that they believed Native Americans posed the greatest threat. Strangely and sadly the typical emigrant experience of months of peace with Native people while heading west in the 1840s and 1850s did little to change emigrants’ minds, deeply programmed as they were. Euro-Americans’strongly negative predispositions were created by generations of negative interactions with Native American peoples. Whether one believed that Native Americans represented man after the Fall or some lower step in the hierarchy of race being constructed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Native peoples represented an obstacle to the growth and health of Western civilization . According to Irving Horowitz, genocide has often been exercised as part of nation building.2 While Horowitz was referencing instances of genocide directed by a central authority, it seems apparent that the Introduction 37 case in California shows genocide capable of being directed peripherally through the operations of democratic, republican forms, in pursuit of the formation and unification of a new portion of the United States. Many Euro-Americans believed that these savage obstacles could be overcome only by their destruction. The belief that a group was a “hindrance” to the progress or prosperity of another group has been a common element in other cases of genocide.3 Settlers from the United States needed only to examine the national history forged by their ancestors for confirmation of Indian savagery. A knowledge of “Indian wars”in the eastern half of North America, fought to seize the birthright of all Americans—arable land...